Jonathan Ive interview: Apple's design genius is British to the core - Telegraph Apple Jonathan Ive interview: Apple's design genius is British to the core Apple’s design guru Jonathan Ive, who receives a knighthood today for creating products such as the iPad, tells Shane Richmond why this country’s industrial heritage lies behind his success. Sir Jonathan Ive is to be given greater control over Apple's product design department Photo: Rex Features By Shane Richmond , Head of Technology (Editorial) 6:30AM BST 23 May 2012 Read part two of The Telegraph's Jonathan Ive interview. Just one person looks twice at Jonathan Ive as we walk through the Apple store in London's Covent Garden and that's a member of staff. The customers are oblivious to the presence of the man responsible for the design of the computers, iPads, iPhones and iPods that they are admiring, tapping and caressing throughout the shop. Ive, a softly spoken, thoughtful Brit, has worked at Apple in California since 1992, and since 1997 has been in charge of its designs. This may well make him the most influential designer in the world.

In creating the iPod he unleashed a product that profoundly altered the music industry, while the iPhone is doing the same to the mobile phone industry. The most recent product from his team, the iPad, is setting the standard for an entirely new category of computer. His incredible run of success has made him revered in the design community and helped him to amass a fortune in excess of £80 million. Even so, he says, he isn’t recognised all that often. “People’s interest is in the product, not in its authorship,” he says. Considerably more people will know Ive’s face after today, when he is to be knighted for services to design and enterprise. The honour, he says, is “incredibly humbling”. Related Articles Apple's design chief: profile 23 May 2012 “All I’ve ever wanted to do is design and make; it’s what I love doing. It’s great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing but then to be able to practise that and be preoccupied with that is another,” he says.

“I’m very aware of an incredible tradition in the UK of designing and making, and so to be recognised in this way is really wonderful.” Ive was born in 1967 in Chingford, Essex, but raised in Staffordshire, where he went to Walton High School, a large comprehensive in Stafford. He says his father, a teacher, was a significant influence on his decision to pursue design. “My father was a very good craftsman. He made furniture, he made silverware and he had an incredible gift in terms of how you can make something yourself.” Ive talks about Apple’s attention to detail in its products – details that often won’t be seen by consumers at all – as a desire to “finish the back of the drawer”. “We do it because we think it’s right,” he says. The seed of that idea was planted while watching his father work. “Growing up, I enjoyed drawing but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time and I enjoyed making.” He studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University, where he still returns frequently to give guest lectures.

“One of the things that was interesting about my time at the school of art and design is that you were in very close proximity to graphic designers, fashion designers and fine art students. That’s one of the things that really characterised my time at college and I think it characterises a lot of the energy and vitality in London, this density of such creative diversity.” It was while he was at university that Ive first encountered an Apple Mac. Having considered himself to be technically inept, he was amazed to find a computer that he could use. “I suddenly realised that it wasn’t me at all. The computers that I had been expected to use were absolutely dreadful.” That experience made Ive curious about Apple and the people behind it. Later, at Tangerine, the design agency he co-founded, he worked for Apple as a consultant. Twenty years ago, he moved to California to join the company full time. Despite that, he says, he is “definitely the product of a very British design education”. “Even in high school I was keenly aware of this remarkable tradition that the UK had of designing and making.

It’s important to remember that Britain was the first country to industrialise, so I think there’s a strong argument to say this is where my profession was founded.” Ive’s design studio, on Apple’s Cupertino campus, a short drive from the San Francisco home where he lives with his British wife, Heather, and two children, is shrouded in secrecy. Only select employees are even allowed inside the office, which has tinted windows and is filled with machines for designing and prototyping Apple’s various products. The sight of the shaven-headed, muscular designer might lead you to expect a brusque, tough character. Apple has a reputation as a challenging company to work for, an image illustrated in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the late co-founder, which told of employees reduced to tears in bitter rows. And yet Ive appears to be quite a gentle person. There are long pauses after each of my questions as he considers his answer and orders his thoughts. When he talks about his work with Apple, he almost always talks about “we”, rather than “I”.

Everything he says emphasises the teamwork involved in producing products such as the iMac, the candy-coloured computer that relaunched Apple on the path to success, or the iPad, the tablet that has redefined the way people use computers. Certain words come up time and again, particularly “simplicity” and “focus”. “We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense,” he explains. “Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products. “I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.” The care that goes into Apple’s products is something that Ive speaks about earnestly. It’s a principle that he traces back to the industrial revolution. “One of the concerns was that there would somehow be, inherent with mass production and industrialisation, a godlessness and a lack of care. “I think it’s a wonderful view that care was important – but I think you can make a one-off and not care and you can make a million of something and care.

Whether you really care or not is not driven by how many of the products you’re going to make.” “We’re keenly aware that when we develop and make something and bring it to market that it really does speak to a set of values. And what preoccupies us is that sense of care, and what our products will not speak to is a schedule, what our products will not speak to is trying to respond to some corporate or competitive agenda. We’re very genuinely designing the best products that we can for people.” In black and white, those sentiments sound idealistic, the kind of thing about which it is easy to be cynical. Like every other electronics manufacturer, Apple has faced questions in recent months over the working conditions in the Far East factories where its products are assembled. Apple has attempted to show that it cares for its workers just as it cares for its customers and products. A detailed series of audits has, Apple says, led to improved standards in the factories it uses and the company argues that it monitors its suppliers more openly and more thoroughly than the competition. Ive and his team don’t just design the products that Apple makes. The ideas are often so new that frequently they have to design the entire production process that the factories will use to make them.

Ive has achieved an awful lot and still has a long career ahead of him. Even so, a knighthood is a good time to take stock. If he was to be remembered for just one of his Apple designs, I ask, which one would he pick? There is the long pause. “It’s a really tough one. A lot does seem to come back to the fact that what we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about.” Apple is famous for its secrecy about future products. I ask what will happen if the Queen asks about the new iPhone today. Will he have to say, “I’m sorry Your Majesty, we don’t comment on forthcoming products”? “That would be funny,” he laughs. But I notice he doesn’t say no. Jonathan Ive - Design Museum Jonathan Ive Posted October 3, 2014 -- Updated November 22 Winner of the Design Museum's inaugural Designer of the Year award, 2003, Jonathan Ive's innovations include the iPod, iMac, MacBook Air, iPhone and iPad.

Share Jonathan Ive Chief Design Officer at Apple The winner of the Design Museum's inaugural Designer of the Year award in 2003 was Jonathan Ive (1967–), Chief Design Officer at Apple whose innovations include the iPod, iMac, iPhone and iPad. As Chief Design Officer at Apple, Jonathan Ive has combined what he describes as 'fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff' with relentless experiments into new tools, materials and production processes, to design such ground-breaking products as the iMac, iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air and iPad. He won the Design Museum's first Designer of the Year prize in 2003 for the iMac and iPod. Born in London in 1967, Ive studied art and design at Newcastle Polytechnic before co-founding Tangerine, a design consultancy where he developed everything from power tools to televisions. In 1992, one of his clients — Apple — offered him a job at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. Working closely with Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, Ive developed the iMac.

As well as selling more than 2 million units in its first year, the iMac transformed product design by introducing colour and light to the drab world of computing where, until its arrival, new products were encased in opaque grey or beige plastic. Ive and his close-knit team of designers at Apple have since applied the same lateral thinking and passionate attention to detail to the development of equally innovative new products such as the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus: the biggest advancements in iPhone history and the iPad Air 2: the thinnest, most powerful iPad ever. Adopt me Adopt an Object 12 iconic objects from the Design Museum collection are up for adoption. Which will you choose? Adoption opens on 1 August. To donate now, visit the campaign page, or text TDMK00 £5 to 70070. How did you first become interested in design? Design Museum I remember always being interested in made objects. The fact they had been designed was not obvious or even interesting to me initially. As a kid, I remember taking apart whatever I could get my hands on. Later, this developed into more of an interest in how they were made, how they worked, their form and material.

Jonathan Ive When did you decide to pursue design as a career and how did you go about it? Design Museum By the age of thirteen or fourteen I was pretty certain that I wanted to draw and make stuff. I knew that I wanted to design but I had no idea what I’d design as I was interested in everything: cars, products, furniture, jewellery, boats. After visiting a few design consultancies I eventually decided that product design would be a pretty good foundation as it seemed the most general. I studied art and design at school and went on to Newcastle Polytechnic. I figured out some basic stuff — that form and colour defines your perception of the nature of an object, whether or not it is intended to. I learnt the fundamentals of how you make things and I started to understand the historical and cultural context of an object’s design. I wish my drawing skills had improved, but while that bothered me then, it doesn't now. Jonathan Ive After graduating, you joined the design consultancy Tangerine. In retrospect, how useful was your experience there? Design Museum I was pretty naïve.

I hadn't been out of college for long but I learnt lots by designing a range of different objects: from hair combs and ceramics, to power tools and televisions. Importantly, I worked out what I was good at and what I was bad at. It became pretty clear what I wanted to do. I was really only interested in design. I was neither interested, nor good at building a business. Jonathan Ive Why did you decide to join Apple? Design Museum I went through college having a real problem with computers. I was convinced that I was technically inept, which was frustrating as I wanted to use computers to help me with various aspects of my design. Right at the end of my time at college I discovered the Mac. I remember being astounded at just how much better it was than anything else I had tried to use. I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its values and its structure.

The more I learnt about this cheeky, almost rebellious company the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn't just about making money. In the early 1990s, I was living in London again and working with a number of clients in Japan, the US and Europe at Tangerine. Apple did a search to find a new design consultant and decided to work with me. I still remember Apple describing this fantastic opportunity and being so nervous that I would mess it all up. While I had never thought that I could work successfully as part of a corporation — always assuming that I would work independently — at the end of a big programme of work for Apple, I decided to accept a full-time position there and to move to California. Jonathan Ive You have described the experience of your first few years at Apple as frustrating. Why was this? And what changed? Design Museum One of my reasons for joining Apple had been a frustration associated with consulting. Working externally made it difficult to have a profound impact on product plans and to truly innovate.

By the time you had accepted a commission, so many of the critical decisions had already been made. Increasingly I had also come to believe that to do something fundamentally new requires dramatic change from many parts of an organisation. When I joined Apple the company was in decline. It seemed to have lost what had once been a very clear sense of identity and purpose. Apple had started trying to compete to an agenda set by an industry that had never shared its goals. While as a designer I was certainly closer to where the decisions were being made, but I was only marginally more effective or influential than I had been as a consultant. This only changed when Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple) returned to the company. By re-establishing the core values he had established at the beginning, Apple again pursued a direction which was clear and different from any other company. Design and innovation formed an important part of this new direction. Jonathan Ive What are the advantages of designing for one company? And the disadvantages? What are the particular characteristics of the set-up at Apple that has made the experience of working there rewarding for you? Design Museum It is pretty humbling when so much of your effectiveness is defined by context.

Not only is it critical that the leadership of a company clearly understands its products and the role of design, but that the development, marketing and sales teams are also equally committed to the same goals. More than ever I am aware that what we have achieved with design is massively reliant on the commitment of lots of different teams to solve the same problems and on their sharing the same goals. I like being part of something that is bigger than design. There is a loyalty that I have for Apple and a belief that this company has an impact beyond design which feels important. I also have a sense of being accountable as we really live, sometimes pretty painfully with the consequences of what we do. Jonathan Ive Similarly, what are the advantages and disadvantages of concentrating on the design of a particular product, in your case, the computer? And is the computer a richer, more rewarding area of design for you to concentrate on now than other products? Design Museum I had been concerned that moving away from working independently for a number of clients on a broad range of products would be difficult. Surprisingly this has not been an issue, as we are really designing systems that include so many different components — headphones, remote controls, a mouse, speakers, as well as computers.

The issue has really been the focus on designing technologically based products. I love working within such a relatively new product category. The opportunities are remarkable as you can be working on just one product that can instantly shatter an entire history of product types and implicated systems. The iPod is a good example as it is not only a very new product but it clearly turns our users’ previous experience and understanding of storing and listening to music upside down. Jonathan Ive What are the defining qualities of the design of an Apple product? To what degree are they related to the design heritage of Apple before your arrival there? Design Museum In the 1970s, Apple talked about being at the intersection of technology and the arts. I think that the product qualities are really consequent to the bigger goals that were established when the company was founded. The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function. Jonathan Ive How would you describe the organisation of the Apple design team? Design Museum We have assembled a heavenly design team. By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process, we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare.

Our physical environment reflects and enables that collaborative approach. The large open studio and massive sound system support a number of communal design areas. We have little exclusively personal space. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work. Jonathan Ive What is it that distinguishes the products that your team develops? Design Museum Perhaps the decisive factor is fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors. Take the iMac — our attempts to make it less exclusive and more accessible occurred at a number of different levels. A detail example is the handle. While its primary function is obviously associated with making the product easy to move, a compelling part of its function is the immediate connection it makes with the user by unambiguously referencing the hand. That reference represents, at some level, an understanding beyond the iMac’s core function. Seeing an object with a handle, you instantly understand aspects of its physical nature — I can touch it, move it, it’s not too precious. With the Power Mac G4 Cube, we created a techno-core suspended in a single piece of plastic. You don’t often get to design something out of one piece of plastic.

This was about simplifying — removing clutter, not just visual but audio clutter. That’s why the core is suspended in air. The air enters the bottom face and without a fan, therefore very quietly, travels through the internal heat sink. Movement within the cube is all vertical — the air, the circuit boards and even the CD eject vertically. The core is easily removed for access to internal stuff. Jonathan Ive You have said that, historically, advances in design have been driven by the development of new materials. Which new materials excite you most now? Design Museum Materials, processes, product architecture and construction are huge drivers in design. Polymer advances mean that we can now create composites to meet very specific functional goals and requirements. From a processing point of view we can now do things with plastic that we were previously told were impossible. Twin shooting materials, moulding different plastics together or co-moulding plastic to metal, gives us a range of functional and formal opportunities that really didn’t exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors enabling us to create a design which was dense completely sealed.

Metal forming and, in particular, new methods of joining metals with advanced adhesives and laser welding is another exciting area right now. Jonathan Ive What are the other catalysts for design's development today? Design Museum New products that replace multiple products with substantial histories is obviously exciting for us. I think another catalyst is the tenacity and high expectations of consumers. With the iPod, the MP3 phenomenon gave us an opportunity to develop an entirely new product and one which could carry 4,000 songs. The big wrestle was to trying to develop something that was new, that felt new and that had a meaning relevant to what it was. Jonathan Ive Conversely, why are so many new products so bland and derivative? Design Museum So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.

Jonathan Ive Born in London, where he spends his childhood 1985 Studies design and art at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) 1989 Becomes a partner at Tangerine, a London-based design consultancy, where he works on a wide range of products from power tools to wash basins 1992 Moves to San Francisco to join the Apple design team 1998 Appointed vice-president of industrial design at Apple Launch of the original iMac, which sells 2 million units in its first year 1999 Introduction of the iBook, the 22" Cinema Display, PowerMac G4 Tower and iSub 2000 Launch of the G4 Cube 2001 Apple introduces the Titanium PowerBook G4 and the iPod portable MP3 player 2002 Launch of the new sunflower-inspired iMac with 15" and 17" floating screens Introduction of the eMac, a version of the iMac specially developed for use in the education sector 2003 Apple launches the 12" PowerBook and the 17" PowerBook, which at 1" thick and 6.8 lbs was the world

’s slimmest and lightest 17" notebook computer Wins the Design Museum's first Designer of the Year prize 2004 Launch of the multi-coloured iPod mini and ultra-slim iMac G5 2005 Appointed senior vice-president of design at Apple Launch of the Mac Mini 2006 Awarded a CBE 2007 Received a National Design Award in the product design category for his work on the iPhone 2008 Received the MDA Personal Achievement Award for the design of the iPhone 2012 Awarded a KBE for services to design and enterprise 2015 On 26 May 2015, Apple announced that Ive was promoted to the new role of Chief Design Officer.

In the Design Museum Collection Apple Computer Mouse Model no. A9M0031 Computer mouse manufactured by Apple Computer Inc., United States of America, 1986 Apple Keyboard M0116 You've taken computers from something you take from a desk to something you put in a bag, to something you put in your pocket, to something you wear now. They're all very different things to do, aren't they? Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum We've been working on this product called Apple Watch. It's been one of the most intriguing programmes because the sort of transition of architectural technology, that became a little bit more personal and made its way into the home, a little bit more personal and into your pocket, this leap to what's worn is a really significant one and there have been some brilliant people in the last few centuries dealing with these issues. Jonathan Ive Vico Magistretti is said to have suggested that unless you're clear enough about a design to describe it over the telephone in 3 minutes, you haven't finished designing it.

Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum Yes, I still haven't lost that sort of wonder of the creative process, and I still think it's the most extraordinary process the way that it comes from nothing. The best ideas, just as Magistretti was saying, they start as conversations, don't they? If it's a big idea, I think you can distil that idea into a few sentences. It's a very fragile process because sentences are sometimes easier to mess up than an object, and so I've felt over the years, one of things I've had to learn a lot about is if it's a sentence it's about listening, and listening very, very carefully because at the earliest stage, a small change that we make right at the beginning defines an entirely different product at the end, so particularly at the very beginning of ideas, we have to have incredible discipline to listen really hard, and to realise and map out how we're going to end up somewhere different if we make these decisions. Jonathan Ive There was once an idea that good design is something that lasts, and now of course we are in a world in which objects tend not to last very long.

Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum I think that's a difficult one. They can last not so long because they're used multiple hours of every day. They can not last as long as you'd wished they did, because the technology relative to what's now available is so much more compelling. I think that's why we all find there is a certain delight in what tends to be singular function objects, because there's less of a requirement on the technology. I think it's a really tough one to compare those sorts of products and those discussions can become hopelessly simplistic. Jonathan Ive But it's changing the way see the world, how design operates. Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum I think what it means is that for those products we are going to use for so many hours every day and are at that point of interface of incredible intimacy between us and the people we care about the most, I think what it means is that we need to invest as much care in how we develop them, as much care as possible in the materials that we use to actually make them. My interpretation is that we acknowledge that our responsibility as designers is important.

Jonathan Ive Do you think what design is now is the same as what it was when you were a student or has it changed to something different? Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum I think the skills are essentially the same. The thing that I find very sad, and I understand why, is that so many of the designers we interview don’t know how to make stuff, because workshops in design schools are expensive and a computer is cheaper. Computer rendering can make a really dreadful design look palatable, and I think that’s just tragic that you spend four years of your life studying the design of three dimensional objects and not make one. Now, that’s great if the ultimate result was to be a graphic image, that’s fine obviously, but how on earth you can do that if what you’re responsible to produce is a three dimensional object? So I think in some ways I’m feeling that the expectation, the contribution that the object can make is more important than ever, because these devices now are so unbelievably powerful in terms of what they can do in isolation and in terms of connecting us to each other. Jonathan Ive You once said you shouldn’t be afraid to fail, which is quite an interesting idea.

Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum Can you imagine you’ve got ten projects you’re working on and each of those ten could have a profound impact on culture in a good way, you really believe, and then you start to realise these four at least aren’t going to work. You don’t believe that we have some ordained right for them to work, they just don’t work unfortunately. For example with the phone, there were so many times when it really didn’t look like that was going to work and we nearly stopped. Do you know the George Bernard Shaw quote about innovation and being unreasonable? It’s a really beautiful thing to say, because to do something new that’s truly innovative, it does require that you reject reason. Jonathan Ive iPod designer Jonathan Ive awarded highest British design honor By Dennis Lloyd ● Sunday, December 21, 2003 “Few people recognise Jonathan Ive. Few could tell you what he does. But most of us know, admire and use his work. Ive, who has just been awarded the highest British design honour with his appointment to the RSA’s Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry, is ‘Mr Mac’.

He is the British designer who has reinvented the computer, the personal stereo and much else besides. By banishing beige boxes and replacing them with sculptural, easy-to-get-to-grips-with products, such as Apple’s iMac and iPod, Ive has transformed the way we look at the electronic stuff that surrounds us.” Who Really Invented the iPod? by Sam Costello Updated August 24, 2016 When a product becomes as popular and widespread worldwide as the iPod, people begin to ask the question "who invented the iPod?" And though anyone who guessed "Steve Jobs and a bunch of folks at Apple" is mostly right, the answer to the question is a little more complex and interesting. Because, like most inventions, the iPod had predecessors--including one as far back as 1970s England. Who Invented the iPod at Apple Apple didn't invent the concept for a music ​player that could fit in your pocket; The iPod was far from the first portable MP3 player. A number of companies--including Diamond, Creative Labs, and Sony--had been selling their own MP3 players for a few years before the iPod debuted in October 2001.

But none of the MP3 players prior to the iPod had been big hits. This was partly due to price and features--the 1999 Creative Labs Nomad had 32 MB of memory (Not GB! 32 MB is enough for about 1 or 2 CDs at low audio quality) and cost US$429--and the digital music market still being pretty young. Remember, there was no iTunes yet, no other download stores , and Napster was still pretty new. The iPod succeeded in part because it was the first product to really make the process of loading and listening to music elegant and enjoyable. The team at Apple took about a year to design and launch the first iPod in October 2001. That team consisted of: Jon Rubinstein, then the company's senior vice president of hardware engineering; now on the board at Qualcomm Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of design at Apple Tony Fadell, an engineer and former senior vice president of the iPod division; his next company, Nest , was purchased by Google for $3.2 billion in Jan.

2014 Michael Dhuey, an engineer; now at Cisco Systems Tim Wasko, an interface designer Steve Jobs , the company's CEO, who oversaw the project It was that team that created the original iPod . The Name Did you know that the person who gave the iPod its name wasn't even an Apple employee? Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, suggested the name iPod because he was inspired by the line in the movie 2001 "Open the pod bay door, HAL." Who Invented the iPod at Other Companies Apple has a reputation for building its hardware and software entirely in-house and not partnering with outside companies. That didn't hold true for the development of the iPod. The iPod was based on a reference design by a company called PortalPlayer (now part of NVIDIA), who had created a prototype device using an embedded operating system. Also in an uncharacteristic move for a company widely known and respected for its user interfaces, Apple didn't completely design the first iPod interface. Instead, it contracted with a company called Pixo (now part of Sun Microsystems) for the foundational interface, which Apple then expanded on. But Who Really Invented the iPod?

As mentioned above, Apple was far from the first company to bring a portable digital music player to the market. But would you believe that the basic concept for the iPod was invented in England in 1979? Kane Kramer, a British inventor, developed and patent the idea of a portable, plastic digital music player in 1979. Though he held the patent for a while, he couldn't afford to renew the worldwide patent on his idea, and because the patent had expired by the time MP3 players became a big business, he was unable to make any money from his original idea when it became widespread in the 1990s and 2000s. Apple has even acknowledged Kramer's role in inventing the iPod as part of its defense against a patent lawsuit in 2008. Continue Reading Apple design chief Jonathan Ive is knighted - BBC News BBC News Apple design chief Jonathan Ive is knighted 23 May 2012 Close share panel Media captionSir Jonathan Ive: video courtesy British Ceremonial Arts Jonathan Ive - the British designer responsible for Apple's iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad - has been knighted at Buckingham Palace.

The 45-year-old said the investiture in front of the Princess Royal was "really thrilling and particularly humbling". Now based in the US, Apple's senior vice-president of industrial design flew in to the UK with his wife and eight-year-old twin sons for the event. He was born in Chingford, east London, and studied at Newcastle Polytechnic. Sir Jonathan had a brief chat with Princess Anne and later revealed they had talked about how often he comes back to the UK while she spoke of her iPad. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the New Year Honours list for services to design and enterprise. After graduating from Newcastle Polytechnic - now Northumbria University - Sir Jonathan began working as a commercial designer before founding design agency Tangerine with three friends. Image caption The "Bondi blue" iMac G3 was launched in 1998 One of the agency's clients, Apple, was so impressed with his work it took him on as a full-time employee in 1992. Sir Jonathan, who now lives in San Francisco, has led the Apple design team since 1996.

He was described by Steve Jobs as his "spiritual partner", according to the late Apple co-founder's biographer Walter Isaacson. His eye for design, combined with Mr Jobs' attention to detail, has helped to turn Apple into one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Over the past 15 years, the company has created a series of products which are all considered to be design classics. They include the iMac G3 - the "Bondi blue" computer launched in 1998 - and the iPod, released in 2001, which helped to revolutionise the music industry. Earlier, in a rare interview, Sir Jonathan told the Daily Telegraph he was "the product of a very British design education". Image caption Sir Jonathan has led Apple's design team since 1996 He said that, "even in high school, I was keenly aware of this remarkable tradition that the UK had of designing and making".

"It's important to remember that Britain was the first country to industrialize, so I think there's a strong argument to say this is where my profession was founded." "We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable, that leave you with the sense that that's the only possible solution that makes sense," Sir Jonathan told the Telegraph. Sir Jonathan said Apple products were tools "and we don't want design to get in the way". He was made a Commander of Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2005. Other figures honoured by Princess Anne on Wednesday included Sir Peter Bazalgette, 59, of Endemol - the TV company behind Big Brother - who was knighted for services to broadcasting. Apple's Jonathan Ive: How did a British polytechnic graduate become its design genius? | Daily Mail Online comments Rob Waugh reports on the rise to near-mythical status of Jonathan Ive, the remarkable man from Chingford Jonathan Ive (left) has helped turn Apple into the second biggest company in the world, with a higher turnover than Google or Microsoft Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword.

It’s considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to be bettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through the night (better to judge the heat of metal by eye) hammering, melting and forging by hand to produce the finest blades in the world. The steel is folded and refolded thousands of times to create a hard outer layer and a softer inner core resulting in a singular blade: terrifyingly sharp but far less prone to breaking than any sword forged in the West. Once the blade is complete it is polished to a mirror finish, an elaborate procedure that itself can take weeks. The long and laborious process pushes metal to its absolute limit – which is precisely why Jonathan Ive wanted to see it first hand. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Ive endlessly seeks crucial knowledge that can help him to make the thinnest computing devices in the world, so it surprised no one at Apple that their obsessive design genius would take a 14-hour flight for a meeting with one of Japan’s leading makers of katana. Afterwards Ive, shaven-headed, heavily muscled, in his trademark T-shirt and jeans, watched intently as the man went about his nocturnal labour.

This month Apple, the fabulously successful technology company – indeed, now the world’s biggest, having surpassed Microsoft – launched its latest piece of technology, the iPad 2. The machine was the result of this sort of research, and Ive’s preferred process of making the same product over and over again; in this case, carving metal and silicon until the product was one-third thinner and 0.2lb lighter than its predecessor. Jonathan Ive surrounded by his creations Ive could be defined by his devotion to detail. When Apple boss Steve Jobs asked him in the late Nineties to create colourful, cheap cathode-ray-tube computers – what would become the first iMac – Ive spent hours in a sweet factory to get inspiration for the colours that would tell the world this wasn’t just a machine for work: it was for fun, too. And so it has been for nearly 14 years – the time Ive has been Apple’s star designer, a fact little known and less publicised in his native Britain due to the obsessive culture of secrecy at Apple.

(His laboratory remains sealed off even from the rest of Apple’s leafy corporate ‘campus’ in San Francisco.) The impact of the 44-year-old, Essex-born, Staffordshire-raised graduate of Newcastle Polytechnic has been incalculable. He is worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the company, which is itself currently valued at a staggering £200 billion. The last decade has belonged to him: his designs for the Californian company have revolutionised everything from music and television to mobile phones and hand-held computers. By designing that first iMac in 1998 and its ever more sleek successors, then the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Ive has helped turn Apple Inc from an also-ran popular chiefly with designers into the second biggest company in the world, with a higher turnover than Google or Microsoft. He will receive £15 million in Apple shares alone next year.

It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that he is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false – he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs’ role when the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or what – or perhaps more accurately who – propelled him to leave for the U.S. in the first place and deny Britain the talents of one of the most influential designers of the modern age. The first multicoloured iMac G3 range (left) and the ubiquitous iPad (right) ‘I often joke that my tombstone will say, “The Guy Who Hired Jonathan Ive”,’ says Robert Brunner, Apple’s former chief of industrial design. ‘He was a consummate designer on all levels, especially around form, detail, materials and refinement and how that extends into manufacturing.’ That man today leaves wife Heather and twin sons at their hilltop home in San Francisco and takes the short drive to Apple in his Bentley Brooklands. His demeanour is serene.

‘He looks like a big skinhead thug but he’s the nicest, politest guy you ever met and very softly spoken,’ says Leander Kahney, editor of the Cult Of Mac website. Once inside his lab, Ive and his hand-picked team of a dozen designers set to work (to music chosen by one of Ive’s celebrity friends, house DJ Jon Digweed) with some of their most important pieces of technology: the very latest in rapid prototyping machines, which build 3D models of the company’s iconic products. Ive is renowned for having an ‘alchemical’ sense for engineering, and the limits of what one can do with metal. As design expert Stephen Bayley puts it: ‘He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence.’ Apple CEO Steve Jobs makes a surprise appearance at the launch of the iPad 2 Ive’s lab is Apple’s inner sanctum. Here, touch screens control the glass-sided machines in which new products take form. Desks are bare bar the aluminium sheets that slot together to form the familiar lines of iconic products such as the MacBook Air.

Collectively, the designers obsess over each product, stripping away non-essential parts, reworking tiny details such as LED indicators on the sides of laptops and phones. Ive once spent months working solely on the stand for Apple’s desktop iMac; he was searching for the sort of organic perfection found in sunflower stalks. That final design used a combination of forged and polished steels and expensive laser welding to create an elegant, beautiful stem that was barely even noticed in the finished product. Ive loathes shape-making for its own sake (Bayley says he’s known to use ‘arbitrary’ as a term of abuse). His most fevered creations never even make it out of the lab. He works by a process of evolution, and failures simply die on the workbench. One Apple senior executive remembers his first visit there: ‘The creations they were working on were all over the map, crazy stuff. It was always very experimental, material that the world is not quite ready for. Even within Apple, the design team is very secretive.’ On the rare occasions Ive speaks in public his conversation is strictly limited to design topics. ‘I get an incredible thrill and satisfaction from seeing somebody with Apple’s tell-tale white earbuds,’ he says.

‘But I’m constantly haunted by thoughts of, is it good enough? Is there any way we could have made it better?’ Guiding everything he does is his unlikely relationship with Jobs. ‘It’s an amazing synergy. It’s about the leader of a company valuing design and the leader of design valuing the company,’ says Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked in Ive’s design team for three years. Fellow designer Sir James Dyson is also a fan of Ive’s approach, which ‘puts the user first’. But he laments the fact that Britain lost his talent to the Americans. ‘Britain has a strong tradition of design and engineering,’ he says. ‘But after we’ve trained brilliant minds, we need to keep them in Britain. Then the designs being exported to the world can create wealth here.’ The manner of his departure for the U.S. is particularly galling to Clive Grinyer, who first hired Ive after he came to work with him on a placement from Newcastle Polytechnic. It came after a presentation of an Ive design to a bathroom-fittings company in Hull. ‘We lost a great talent,’ says Grinyer.

‘We virtually created our own consultancy, Tangerine, just so that we could employ Jony (as Ive prefers to be called). And if I had to put my finger on why and where we lost him it would have to have been one day at Ideal Standard in Hull. Jonathan Ive at the Goodwood Festival of Speed 'Tangerine had a consultancy contract with the bathroom-fittings company to design a toilet. I was there when Jony made an excellent presentation to this guy who was wearing a red nose because it was Comic Relief day. This clown then decided to throw his weight around and pulled apart Jony’s design. It was ridiculous. Britain lost Jony Ive then and there.’ Tangerine had also been hired to do some work for Apple, and Ive’s visits to California offered him an escape route. ‘One day Jonathan asked to stay out for some California sunshine, even though it was the winter over there. When he came back he had a smile on his face and I knew they had made him a job offer. He hasn’t got where he is because of his ego. They just realised he was completely in tune with Apple’s DNA. They work bloody hard. So does he. It is not about the hours.

It’s the weeks and months that they work on projects.’ Which makes it all the more compelling that when Ive left for Apple, he would not become a guru overnight. Rather, his first years in California would prove so difficult that he almost never made it at all. As well as both being famous British exports, Jonathan Paul Ive and David Beckham have something else in common: they both went to Chingford foundation school (eight years apart). Ive was born in Chingford in 1967, but his family moved from Essex to Staffordshire in the early Eighties, when his ambitious father swapped his job as a design and technology teacher to become a schools inspector. His father’s expertise clearly rubbed off on Ive, because by the time he had enrolled in Walton High School on the fringes of Stafford teachers could see he was a skilled draughtsman and design technician. ‘He was a determined character – he settled in straight away,’ recalls retired teacher John Haddon. Ive met his future wife there: Heather Pegg, who was also the child of a local schools inspector, was one year below Ive and they married in 1987.

Fellow pupils remember a chubby, dark-haired, modest teenager who made the most of his abilities, be they as a rugby player or a frustrated musician. ‘Jony was a big Roger Waters fan,’ recalls Walton old boy Chris Kimberley. ‘He was drummer in a band called Whiteraven. The other band members were much older than him. They all met through an evangelical church called the Wildwood Fellowship. They used to play mellow rock in church halls.’ Alan Saunders was his captain in the school rugby team: ‘He was a gentle giant. He was very unassuming but he did somehow have a big presence about him, and complete commitment. He played prop forward and I never once saw him shy away from a challenge.’ Jonathan Ive (circled) as a sixth former at Walton High School, Stafford Ive went to London’s Central St Martins Art School with an initial passion to design cars, but switched to an industrial design course at what was then Newcastle Polytechnic. ‘His attitude to work was incredibly thorough,’ remembers lecturer Neil Smith. ‘Whatever he did was never quite enough; he was always looking to improve the design. He was exceptionally perceptive and diligent as a student.

It was never a case of just going through the motions.’ Smith says that Ive still has contact with what is now Northumbria University as a visiting professor. ‘He is incredibly self-effacing and makes it clear that Apple’s success is not just about him but his team. He runs the project almost to the point of manufacture. It’s sad that companies in the UK were not interested in looking forward when Jonathan was here. That has changed now and design is no longer the pariah of industry. And I think that is, in part, thanks to the influence of Apple and Ive.’ His career at Apple had a relatively inauspicious start. Leander Kahney says, ‘Apple took him out to California and told him things would be great. But the company was tanking and he ended up working on his own in a basement office. He was cranking out weird stuff and filled the space with hundreds of prototypes. None of them were getting made and no one was paying any attention to him or to his work. He was very frustrated.’ ‘For the first three years Jony was having a pretty miserable time designing Newton PDAs and printer trays,’ says Clive Grinyer.

‘It was a bad existence.’ The design team was eventually forced to surrender the Cray supercomputer it used for simulating new gadgets. Even the designs that did get built were met with a lukewarm reception. Ive’s Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh was one of the first computers to have a flat LCD screen but it was saddled with a strangely squashed appearance and a massive price tag. Originally priced at $9,000, it was selling for under $2,000 by the time it was pulled from shelves less than a year later. But just as Ive was considering a return to England, his luck changed. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after an absence of 12 years. He purged the company, dropping most of its products and dispensing with staff. Eventually, Jobs took a tour of the design department, then based across the street from Apple’s main campus. ‘Jobs comes in, looks at all Ive’s amazing prototypes and says, “My God, what have we got here?”’ says Kahney. Jobs swiftly brought Ive in from the cold, moving the designers into a building on campus and investing in the latest rapid-prototyping equipment.

He also beefed up Apple’s security, locking down the design studio to prevent leaks and installing a private kitchen so designers wouldn’t talk shop in public. Jonathan Ive leaving his San Francisco home in a Bentley Brooklands Ive responded by delivering the iMac, a curvy, semi-transparent desktop computer that looked utterly different from anything else on the market. Although it was an immediate hit with users, Ive’s iMac did not quite meet Jobs’ standards of perfection. Its translucent mouse was clumsy and the choice of new USB connection technology caused problems. ‘Jonathan took his share of beatings early on,’ reveals Valarie Sobolewski, a software engineer who worked at Apple for over a decade. ‘To be in Steve’s world, you’ve got to be willing to take a buffeting.’ But by the time the first iPod music player launched in 2001, Ive and Jobs had finally clicked and the sleek, minimalist Apple vibe of today was born. ‘The iPod showed customers that we were thinking about things completely differently. It had no features really - just play, up and down – but for the first time you could enjoy the experience of simply getting your music on and off your computer,’ says Thomas Meyerhoffer.

Ive and Apple refined the iPod, brought out smaller, slimmer and coloured versions, and eventually added video and games. With the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, they single-handedly created a market for countless smartphone apps. Jonathan Ive's Grade II listed mansion in Somerset ‘Ive understands that it is the usefulness of a product that counts, not technological speeds and features,’ says Mike Martucci, a former director of marketing at Apple. ‘Design drives the technology, not the other way around.’ Ive soaked up the pressure, refusing to hire more designers and continuing to experiment. ‘One of the hallmarks of our team is this sense of looking to be wrong,’ he has said. ‘It’s the inquisitiveness, the sense of exploration. It’s about being excited to be wrong because then you’ve discovered something new.’ Although sometimes he was just plain wrong. Ive’s G4 Cube computer was discontinued after its case cracked. A rectangular Mac Mini did not sell well. But perhaps it says more about Ive’s recent success that we’ve come to expect perfection. Today, with Jobs on an extended leave of absence and Apple’s debt to Ive so immense, speculation has mounted Ive could even replace him as CEO.

Those with any knowledge of the tech industry, however, know that current acting CEO Tim Cook, the business genius who streamlined Apple’s supply chain, is a far more likely bet were Jobs to step down. Speculation that Ive would leave Apple to return to the UK is also false, says a former colleague: ‘I’m not sure there is any truth he wants to come back. My last conversations with him were that he was planning to sell his house in the UK.’ But Ive’s personal desires could be irrelevant. What would the designer of iPad be worth to Samsung, or Microsoft, or Sony? Far too much, many think, for him to ever be let go. For now, Apple is at the crest of a wave, and Ive is the most successful designer on the planet. STEPHEN BAYLEY ...ON JONATHAN IVE, THE DESIGNERS' DESIGNER Who is the most valuable Englishman on earth? Wayne Rooney? Colin Firth? Neither gets near Jonathan Ive, the boy from Chingford who is now senior vice-president of industrial design at Apple. Ive has given style to a family of machines that has changed the way the world thinks.

Transient, global, instantaneous, intelligent, wireless connectivity is a bigger idea than the French Revolution. More than any other individual, Ive has decided what this idea should look like. And it looks beautiful, desirable. In the nearly 20 years since he joined Apple (which dropped the word 'Computer' from its corporate name in 2001), sales have increased ten times. In 1992 Apple Computer made $530 million profit from selling a lacklustre and directionless range of boring products the colour of tinned mushroom soup with excitement to match. Last year, Apple's profits were $14 billion selling gorgeous entertainment products that cause consumers to form enormous queues and camp out overnight. Sometimes, they riot. The iMac G4, with its stand based on a sunflower stem AAPL, as it is known on the New York Stock Exchange, was recently valued at $324 billion - that's more than £200 billion. If market capitalisation is your measure, Apple is the second biggest company on Earth after Exxon-Mobil. It is not yet 40 years old. Not all of this extraordinary accumulation of value can be attributed to Ive's fastidious, yet utterly seductive, design.

But this wealth would not have been created without him and his unerring hand and eye. We forget it now, but MP3 audio data compression technology was around before the iPod appeared in 2001. The problem was the machines that used it were about as attractive as a car battery. And about as amusing to carry around. In the iPod Ive created a package that was lucid and easy-to-use. He applied a very strong draught of meditative intelligence to understanding what the technology offered and then exploited every known design artifice to make that apparent. Simplify, then exaggerate is the key to successful communications. That's what Ive did with Apple products. They elegantly and unambiguously communicate a cleanlined, status-rich sense of purpose. And the amazing thing is, in achieving this, Ive has proved that the consumer is not a penny-pinching moron nor a brute philistine. On the contrary, Apple's persuasive financials show that the consumer is a sophisticated aesthete who will cheerfully pay a premium price to own products that flatter by their pristine beauty and sparkly intelligence.

So, just as the gobby John Galliano calamitously destroyed value at Dior, the quietly spoken and self-deprecating Jonathan Ive creates it in spades at Apple. Galliano's wince-making dégringolade also showed the public is fatigued by trash-luxe; discipline and restraint are more appropriate to our age. Forget dressing-up, dressing-down is what we want. So Ive's austere aesthetic that turns plastic and metal into gold is absolutely right for this historic moment. That is why he is so very valuable. The ultra-thin MacBook Air Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialities and press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very little interest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to its character: his mind occupies a workshop, not an artist's atelier. With an Ive product, it is impossible to say where the engineering ends and the 'design' begins. It's a continuum. He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. It's what Ive calls 'effort and care beyond the usual'. He has very few distractions.

As soon as Ive had the budget, he bought advanced machine-tools for model-making in Apple's design studio. This is what he spends time doing: a continuous process of testing, testing, testing. With the MacBook Air, he told me it's, metallurgically speaking, about as far as you can actually go with aluminium before you start disrupting molecules. A calm and engaging personal manner becomes almost excitable when he describes the outer limits of transforming stainless steel. This Zen-like obsession with materials, with getting to what he calls the 'local maximum', is what gives Apple products their extreme appearance. If, Ive argues, you understand how something is made, you understand everything about it. And he does. When Apple's founder, the exigent Steve Jobs, decided he did not like exposed screwheads, Ive's engineering knowledge (with an added dash of intuitive genius) found a way to avoid them: Apple uses magnets to hold components together. And it is because Ive fully understands the arcana of bonding, coating and abstruse areas of plastic technology that an iPod Nano looks and feels the way it does. It is the very opposite of slick, superficial design: it is the inevitable result of his working methods.

Ive detests shape-making for its own sake and uses 'arbitrary' as a term of abuse. Ive has the ability to put meaningful form onto what before was indeterminate. Chief among his influences is Jobs himself, who disproves Scott Fitzgerald's mournful line about there being no second acts in American lives. Ive joined Apple five years before Jobs' resurrection-like comeback in 1997. With a hard-nosed zealotry that seems at odds with his enthusiasm for oriental religion, Jobs purged Apple's demoralised staff, axed its muddled range and insisted on excitement. He considered hiring Giorgetto Giugiaro, the maestro of Italian car design, to rejuvenate the company, but instead promoted the then obscure in-house Jonathan Ive. His iMac made desktop computers a pleasurable, almost edible, delight. The iPod was covetable jewellery. The iPhone democratised portable computing while the iPad reminds me of Arthur C Clarke's remark that 'any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic'. I mentioned this to Jony and he told me they were thinking exactly that when the iPad was going through the studio. Beauty, pleasure, democracy and magic are, it seems, a winning combination.

Strange no one got there before. This is a wonderful story, the best ever 'design' story, but I wonder whether it might be coming to an end. There are some strange contradictions at Apple. So far from being a macrobiotic commune of haikuchanting techno-hippies, it is an ever more secretive and controlling mega-corporation. Someone said of Jobs: 'Steve's a Buddhist. Imagination how aggressive he would be otherwise.' It is like the Pentagon, but the uniform is faded blue jeans, New Balance trainers and charcoal, monk-like Issey Miyake turtlenecks. In this context, Ive has even more to offer Apple than a genius for the design process: a human face. With Jobs increasingly sidelined by health, people mutter about succession. Would the world's most valuable Englishman and the world's most influential designer want to stay at Apple when it is run by investor-facing professional managers and not the maddeningly idiosyncratic and demanding, but inspirational, Jobs? Now the draft of a psycho-thriller comes to mind. What if Jonathan Ive wanted to leave Silicon Valley? What might Apple do to stop him ?

He has, actually and metaphorically, a place in the sun, and he tells me he couldn't be happier, as he is free to spend the entire working day on design. But sometimes I wonder if he might be trapped in a gilded cage.

Question: Which British designer designed the iPod?
Answer: Jonathan Ive